


With ash in her hair

by coffeeandoranges



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Murder, Not A Fix-It, Psychosis, but not.... not a fix-it either, mentions of Shae, mentions of domestic violence, spoilers for leaks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-04 22:45:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18822292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeeandoranges/pseuds/coffeeandoranges
Summary: The smell of burning lingers.





	With ash in her hair

**Author's Note:**

> So I hate it. Violently. This is my attempt at processing.

He tells her it was Varys, because it's his job to.

He tells her for revenge— _a trick, a shadow on the wall—_ a dead man’s wail, a man worse than dead. _If you have the stomach for it._

He tells her because he’d want to be told.

He tells her (don’t laugh) because after all he has some broad streak of honor in him.

He tells her because he loves her.

 

He tells her because he doesn’t know what _love_ means, and neither does she.

 

.

 

 

 

 

Everything burns to the ground.

 

 

.

 

“Jon.”

 

He cuts her off. “Varys.”

 

.

 

“You’re under arrest,” she says. “For treason.” Her hands are folded like his sister’s as the Unsullied general comes to arrest him. Her eyes are glacial. Implacable as a glacier.

He splits his face with a grin.

He has been in chains many times.

Cersei and Dany, Cersei and Dany, CerseiandDany. He doesn’t know where one ends and the other begins.

 

His sister, whom he betrayed. His sister, whom he freed.

 

Jaime was right.

 

Everything was Cersei.

 

 

.

 

 

.

 

 

Everything is wildfire.

 

 

How cruel that now, after everything is lost, after all is for scrap, all of them left for the crows, he discovers—as he has known all along—that he is not without his twin in this world.

 _If Jaime could see me now!_ He thinks, exultant, chained to a post in the only shack left standing in the rubble of King’s Landing.

_What short work a woman has made of me now._

He imagines Brienne. Her simple heartbreak. He cannot imagine.

 

.

 

 

The smell of burning lingers.

 

 

 

.

 

She is not his queen, this madwoman, who hides daggers in her cloak and wanders the streets with ashes in her hair. She is the monster who burned them and imprisoned him and sent for Jon's head on a pike and will make them pay for all their betrayals. And he is a monster, too, but not of her making. 

 

 

.

 

“I could wet your cunt as easily as Lord Snow, you know,” he says to his queen.

She lets out a feral shriek, and rattles the bars of his makeshift cage.

Then she collapses in a fit of loose hair, clutching her face with her hands, makes a tearless sob that rises from the center of her chest.

 

His sister again, there. The same cry Cersei used to have when the servants muddied her dolls.

 

“I should have burned you with Varys,” she gasps. Strands of hair cling to the sweat on her temples.

 

Her mother now, Rhaella. Tyrion never saw her but he saw portraits.

 

 

 

 

 

.

 

He used to think that was power, the world flattened into manuscript. Names, dates, coronations, depositions. The world in a string of fine names. His would never be one of them. It was the first fact he knew, after he knew there were no dragons.

 

If he survives he will ride one, and burn them all as well.

 

 

 

The only difference between him and Daenerys is his jealousy.

 

.

 

 

“We are the same, you and I.”

 

She raises her head from her knees.

 

“I burned King’s Landing too.”

 

He has been rehearsing this in his mind for hours.

 

“Do you love me?” She looks child-like, a strange expression in the sunken hollows of her eyes.

 

Because he is a creature of lies, he answers: Yes.

 

.

 

Gods damn the time he lost chasing Sansa’s skirts.

 

 

.

 

 

“Tell me about your father,” she says. They have hours now, and there is nothing more to win.

He tells her.

 

 

 

“I was never more his son,” Tyrion says. “As I was watching him sitting there dripping in his shit.”

 

“Why?” His Mad Queen wishes to know.

 

“Because—“

 

“Because of a word.”

 

“What was the word?”

 

Tyrion cannot say it, now, even after all this time.

 

_Wh-_

_Wherever—_

 

“Whores.”

 

The word is a breath on his tongue.

 

“And there was one.” He goes on, speaking when he knows he should remain silent.

 

“Was,” says Dany.

 

“I killed her,” he says. “Ripped her throat out with my hands.”

 

“You killed a girl,” she says.

 

“And you killed a kingdom.”

 

“I suppose we are even,” she says. That is not what he meant her to say. Not what he thought she would say.

 

He sneers at her. “I killed one girl and you killed millions. That does not make us even.”

 

“One girl is millions,” she says. “When she died with your hands around her neck.”

 

 

Daenerys climbs through the bars of the cage she made for this man.

 

She wraps her fingers around his neck--

_(where he sat, naively trusting her, where he sat there, her prisoner, the fool, where he believed his stories would save him)_

And lifts him—

And as his neck turns purple and white—

And as her nails leave red half moons in his skin—

 

She thrusts Valyrian steel through his shallow heart and his blood runs like gold down her arms and chest.

 

She weeps and feels clean.

 

 

.

 

 

Later on, a girl wearing her brother’s face, Azor Ahai with ash in her hair, finds her there and finishes her too.

 

 

 

 

_I loved a maid as fair as summer_

_with sunlight in her hair._

_I loved a maid as red as autumn_

_with sunset in her hair._

_I loved a maid as white as winter_

_with moonglow in her hair._

 

 


End file.
